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Hello Reader,
Essay
Last month, a single word published by the New York Times did an extraordinary amount of work. It settled beyond question — for you, for me, for everyone — one of the most profound questions of our time.
I was digging deeper into claims that Nigerian Christians are being targeted and massacred by Muslim extremists. Sifting through research, I landed on a Times piece about Christian activists pressing the Trump administration on behalf of the victims. And there it was, tucked into a subordinate clause: the description of a man who had "falsely argued that violence is a fundamental part of Islam."
The self-appointed guardians of our culture had decided. No evidence cited. The debate, closed. The backlink cited only "scholars' assessment that Islamic militancy is an outgrowth of poverty, poor governance and war."
Scholars, apparently, speak with one unanimous voice — heard only by the New York Times. None, apparently, have considered whether the model of centralized, divine authority dominant in the Muslim world has contributed to that poverty and poor governance.
There's a coherent intellectual tradition behind this reflex — and I once subscribed to it myself: a cultural tolerance that has morphed into dangerous moral equivalence. With it comes the conviction that distinguishing among cultural norms constitutes bigotry, and that the West's proper posture is contrition for its sins rather than advocacy for its values.
But here's the problem with broad, predetermined narratives: contradictory evidence must be buried to ensure their survival.
To wit — When two Pennsylvania men drove to New York City on March 7 and hurled IEDs — packed with TATP, the volatile compound jihadists call "Mother of Satan" — at anti-Islam protesters outside Gracie Mansion. One pledged allegiance to ISIS in writing after his arrest. The other said one word to officers: "ISIS." The Times led its coverage with a lengthy scene-setter about the (truly reprehensible) "far-right provocateur" leading the protest. The attackers appeared well into the piece, their ISIS declarations subordinated to the protest's optics. The bombs were reduced to "smoking jars of metal and fuses." CNN posted a sympathy piece about two young men whose lives "would drastically change," as if they had no agency — deleted after universal backlash. The perpetrators were ISIS-pledged terrorists. The story became Islamophobia.
They are asking you to ignore the evidence of your eyes and ears.
Before going further: American Muslims are among the most professionally accomplished immigrant communities in this country — more likely than the general U.S. population to hold college degrees, and there is no credible evidence they commit violent crime at elevated rates.
These pages have advocated for Uyghur Muslims in China, India’s Muslim minority, Rohingya in Myanmar, West Bank Palestinians, non-Hamas Gazans, and the Baloch in Pakistan, among others. During 25 years in a technology career, many of my closest colleagues were Muslim —among my genuine favorites. I used to beam with pride at how well Muslims integrated into American life compared to Europe. I'm not retracting any of that. I'm complicating it.
Because here is the question the Times foreclosed with a single adverb: Is "Islamophobia" actually a phobia? The word implies irrational fear. But what if the concern is rational — and simply lacks precision? And if we’re not anti-Islam, what, exactly, is our concern? A sect? A specific creed or Quranic verse? A governance model?
Next Friday, these pages will go where they won’t —honestly, precisely, and without the predetermined conclusion. It's the kind of analysis you’ll rarely find anywhere else.
The Rebellion Goes Legit: Paid Subscriptions
Today, we celebrate Episode 100 of Dispatches from the Rebellion, and it felt like the right moment. Nearly 4,000 hours of work. Close to 30 publications scanned regularly, synthesizing across sources most readers never see. One reader, one episode at a time.
This is the last completely free edition. Starting next Friday, the full Counterstrikes episode goes to paid subscribers only — and each Tuesday's global edition will keep its first three stories free, with the final two behind the paywall.
$75 a year, or $8 a month. Cancel any time.
Note: No Tuesday edition next week — I'll be taking my daughter on a short trip! See you Friday.
A More Perfect Union
This week's domestic front brings two rulings with sweeping implications for free speech. Two juries handed down verdicts that could fundamentally reshape how social media companies operate—and who controls what you read online. Plus, the American revolutionary spirit lives on.
New Mexico Takes a Chisel to Free Speech...
States have wanted to crack Section 230 of the Communications Act for years. New Mexico just found the chisel.
On Tuesday, a jury ordered Meta—parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—to pay $375 million after ruling its product design exposed minors to online predators. Section 230 of the 1996 law was supposed to prevent exactly this. It established that speakers—not platforms—bear liability for harmful content, because holding platforms responsible would force them to police every post, destroying open discourse. So New Mexico reframed the lawsuit entirely: sue over product design, not speech. If the algorithm—not the content flowing through it—caused harm, Section 230 does not apply.
But Reason identifies the fatal flaw: you cannot separate design from the speech it enables. What makes an algorithm dangerous is the ideas users encounter through it. Imposing liability for dangerous ideas raises one unavoidable question: who decides which ideas qualify?
The New Mexico attorney general, apparently.
At best, this is genuine child protection by creative legal means. At worst, it is the regulatory left using children as cover to extract billions from its favorite villain—big tech— and to establish government as the permanent arbiter of acceptable speech, because parents apparently cannot be trusted with the job themselves.
...And Los Angeles Hammers It Home
Welcome to my adopted home state of California, where nobody is responsible for their own behavior. Where politicians must protect you from yourself. Where someone rich must pay.
On Wednesday, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable for a 20-year-old woman's mental health struggles and awarded her $6 million in damages—the opening shot in more than 3,000 pending California lawsuits targeting social media companies for the travails of young people.
Alarmingly, the jury went beyond negligence. It found both companies acted with malice, oppression, or fraud. Negligence means they should have known better. Malice means the jury concluded they did know, and harmed users anyway. That finding triggered an additional $3 million in punitive damages on top of the compensatory award.
The Wall Street Journal identified the subtext: a payday for the plaintiffs' bar, not a victory for children. Trial lawyers are salivating, and more than 40 state attorneys general have piled on.
The addiction argument deserves a hearing—but only so far. The plaintiff says compulsive scrolling left her with severe depression, body dysmorphia, and suicidal thoughts.
For younger children, these algorithms are deliberately engineered to exploit developing brains. But this plaintiff started using YouTube at six and Instagram at nine—both platforms require users to be at least 13. Her parents permitted it. Defense arguments about her turbulent home life and learning disabilities fell on deaf ears.
But here’s what troubles me most: A jury just told an entire generation they have no power over their own choices.
That’s one lesson my daughter will never learn.
The American Revolutionary Spirit Lives On
In 1765, the British Parliament levied a tax on every piece of printed paper in the colonies—newspapers, legal documents, even playing cards. The Sons of Liberty's response was immediate: they burned the tax collector's effigy in the streets of Boston, looted his home, and forced his resignation. The stamps were never collected. John Adams called the act an engine “for battering down all the Rights and Liberties of America."
Some things never change.
Britain's overbearing communications regulator, Ofcom, recently fined 4chan—an anonymous American message board where users post text and images without creating accounts—nearly $700,000 for failing to implement age verification under its Online Safety Act. The extortion racket, it seems, extends beyond British shores.
Ofcom's record at home is instructive. Under the same law, Reddit discussions about Ukraine and Gaza were age-restricted. A parliamentary speech about the UK’s child rape scandal was blocked. A Goya painting was censored. These are not edge cases—they are the point.
Forcing age verification on 4chan would destroy its core feature: anonymity. The First Amendment protects the right to speak without identifying yourself. Ofcom cannot override that for an American company with no UK assets, employees, or presence.
4chan's lawyer replied to Ofcom's demand with a message that should be framed in every newsroom in America: "The United Kingdom lost the American Revolutionary War. We are not in the mood to discuss the matter further, and have not been in the mood for 250 years."
Happy semiquincentennial to us — let the party begin.
Counterstrikes
Most weeks, this is where misleading media and government narratives meet their demise. But this week, we turn the lens inward.
Follow the Evidence
This newsletter has frequently argued dictatorships should be opposed, not engaged — that our alliances should be built around human rights and shared democratic values, not transactional material gains. After all, one of the most robust findings in political science is that full democracies have never fought a war against each other.
But reality is a pesky thing, and evidence sometimes forces a reassessment.
Qatar hosts Al Udeid — the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East — and shot down Iranian bombers targeting it when the war began. Saudi Arabia ran a joint command center with U.S. Central Command and lobbied Trump directly to strike Iran. Trump signed an executive order last September declaring any attack on Qatar a threat to U.S. security. These pages mocked him.
But here are autocracies, delivering what our democratic allies have not.
Last December, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko — Europe's self-proclaimed last dictator — freed 123 political prisoners under U.S. pressure, including my resistance hero, Maria Kalesnikava, and Nobel laureate Ales Bialiatski. This week, 250 more walked free. Venezuela's Delcy Rodriguez has released hundreds. Cuba just invited exiles home to open businesses — its most significant opening in decades.
These aren't abstractions. These are people who were in cages — embracing their families, free again to author more Dispatches from the Rebellion.
The danger is real too: make just enough concessions to legitimize the regime, pocket the sanctions relief, and wait for the next administration. Belarus still holds over 1,100 political prisoners. Venezuela's amnesty carves out the charges the regime used most. Cuba's "doors are open" — while the Castros remain.
And Trump's diplomacy comes packaged with a Qatari jet, corrupt Middle East business dealings, and mining concessions from desperate regimes.
I won't stop advocating for democratic values — or for governments that return power to their people. But I won't preserve the purity of that argument at the expense of the evidence.
And the recent evidence says this: Trump's transactional diplomacy has, at least temporarily, delivered genuine humanitarian gains.
American Renegade of the Week: Arthur Liu
The feature returns, and will appear occasionally, along with its global companion, Freedom Fighter of the Week.
On February 19th, Alyssa Liu stepped onto the Milan ice with striped hair — brunette and bright blonde — and waved up at the crowd. Her smile flashed with silver: a frenulum piercing she'd done herself in a mirror, with her sister holding her lip. Absent was the clenched-teeth grimace of her competitors.
Alyssa was beaming.
The sportscasters called it "ebullient joy enveloping her technical brilliance." She landed a quad jump and a triple Axel in the same program — feats no American woman had ever pulled off at the Olympics. After she won gold, one writer found the perfect words:
Liu wasn’t chasing a gold medal. She was free.
Her father Arthur knew exactly what she was skating for. In 1989, he led hunger strikes in Guangzhou as students filled Tiananmen Square. When tanks rolled on June 4th, the government put him on its "most wanted" list. Hong Kong's Operation Yellowbird smuggled him out, and eventually to America.
But even Arthur's escape didn't mean safety. Prior to the 2022 Beijing Olympics, Chinese spies visited his Bay Area home posing as U.S. Olympic Committee officials to harvest passport information. Others planted a GPS-tracking device on his car. The CCP had reason to worry: Alyssa had spoken out against China's persecution of the Uyghurs — nearly three million in forced labor by 2023.
Contrast Alyssa with Eileen Gu — born in San Francisco, trained in Lake Tahoe, three Olympic medals won for China— her athletic prowess for sale along with her principles: $14 million from Beijing to fly its flag, $23 million more in endorsements. When asked about the Uyghurs, Gu declared it "not my business” and that she’s “not an expert”. It doesn’t take expertise to know 3 million people enduring imprisonment and forced labor is wrong.
As always, those closest to tyranny know it best. Last week, Arthur took to The Free Press to write about it — and to remind us that Jimmy Lai, who helped bankroll Operation Yellowbird, is now serving 20 years in Hong Kong for criticizing the government that pays Gu to stay silent. Note: The Gu addition is mine, not Arthur’s.
Lai chose freedom over comfort. So did Arthur Liu. His daughter's gold, he wrote, was a lesson in "how precious freedom is" — and proof it's still possible to "free human beings everywhere...to enjoy their natural rights to live as they choose."
And that, reader, is what this Rebellion is all about.
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